The second floor galleries in a line: skylights with their diffusers, red and grey walls, oak floors, benches in the middle, the works hung at the museum's own height.
The Met hangs its European paintings in a long run of skylit galleries on the second floor above the Great Hall. The collection holds five paintings by Vermeer, along with Rembrandt, El Greco, Velazquez, Bruegel and the Impressionists. A five year project to replace the skylights finished in 2023, and the galleries reopened rehung under the new light.
Source · The Metropolitan Museum of Art ↗
The enfilade of galleries seen through aligned doorways, the coved skylights with their scrim, dark red and slate walls, herringbone oak floors, leather benches, the labels, the guards at the doors. Mood: museum daylight. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.